My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field

by Charles Carleton Coffin

The people of the country determined that the Constitution, the Union, and the government bequeathed by their fathers should be preserved. They authorized the President to raise a great army. Congress voted money and men. The President, acting as the agent of the people, and as Commander-in-Chief, appointed men to bring all the materials together and organize the army. Look at what was wanted to build this mighty machine and to keep it going.

First, the hundreds of thousands of men; the thousands of horses; the thousands of barrels of beef, pork, and flour; thousands of hogsheads of sugar, vinegar, rice, salt, bags of coffee, and immense stores of other things. Thousands of tons of hay, bags of oats and corn. What numbers of men and women have been at work to get each soldier ready for the field. He has boots, clothes, and equipments. The tanner, currier, shoemaker, the manufacturer, with his swift-flying shuttles, the operator tending his looms and spinning-jennies, the tailor with his sewing-machines, the gunsmith, the harness-maker, the blacksmith,—all trades and occupations have been employed. There are saddles, bridles, knapsacks, canteens, dippers, plates, knives, stoves, kettles, tents, blankets, medicines, drums, swords, pistols, guns, cannon, powder, percussion-caps, bullets, shot, shells, wagons,—everything.

Walk leisurely through the camps, and observe the little things and the great things, see the men on the march. Then go into the Army and Navy Departments in Washington, in those brick buildings west of the President’s house. In those rooms are surveys, maps, plans, papers, charts of the ocean, of the sea-coast, currents, sand-bars, shoals, the rising and falling of tides. In the Topographical Bureau you see maps of all sections of the country. There is the Ordnance Bureau, with all sorts of guns, rifles, muskets, carbines, pistols, swords, shells, rifled shot, fuses which the inventors have brought in. There are a great many bureaus, with immense piles of papers and volumes, containing experiments upon the strength of iron, the trials of cannon, guns, mortars, and powder. There have been experiments to determine how much powder shall be used, whether it shall be as fine as mustard-seed or as coarse as lumps of sugar, and the results are all noted here. All the appliances of science, industry, and art are brought into use to make it the best army the world ever saw.

It is the business of the government to bring the materials together, and the business of the generals to organize it into brigades, divisions, and corps,—to determine the number of cavalry and batteries of artillery, to place weak materials in their proper places, and the strongest where they will be most needed.

The general commanding must have a plan of operations. Napoleon said that war is like a game of chess, and that a commander must make his game. He must think it out beforehand, and in such a manner that the enemy will be compelled to play it in his way and be defeated. The general-in-chief must see the end from the beginning, just as Napoleon, sticking his map of Europe full of pins, decided that he could defeat the Austrians at Austerlitz, the Prussians at Jena. That is genius. The general-in-chief makes his plan on the supposition that all his orders will be obeyed promptly, that no one will shirk responsibility, that not one of all the vast multitude will fail to do his duty.

The night before the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon sent an order to an officer to take possession of a little hillock, on which stood a farm-house overlooking the plain. The officer thought it would do just as well if he let it go till morning, but in the morning the English had possession of the spot, and in consequence of that officer’s neglect Napoleon probably lost the great battle, his army, and his empire. Great events often hang on little things, and in military operations it is of the utmost importance that they should be attended to.

From the beginning to the end, unless every man does his duty, from the general in command to the private in the ranks, there is danger of failure.

Thus the army is organized, and thus through organization it becomes a disciplined body. Instead of being a confused mass of men, horses, mules, cannon, caissons, wagons, and ambulances, it is a body which can be divided, subdivided, separated by miles of country, hurried here and there, hurled upon the enemy, and brought together again by the stroke of a pen, by a word, or the click of the telegraph.

When a battle is to be fought, the general-in-chief must not only have his plan how to get the great mass of men to the field, but he must have a plan of movement on the field. Each corps must have its position assigned. There must be a line of battle. It is not a continuous line of men, but there are wide spaces, perhaps miles wide, between the corps, divisions, and brigades. Hills, ravines, streams, swamps, houses, villages, bushes, a fence, rocks, wheat-fields, sunlight and shade, all must be taken into account. Batteries must be placed on hills, or in commanding positions to sweep all the country round. Infantry must be gathered in masses in the centre or on either wing, or deployed and separated according to circumstances. They must be sheltered. They must be thrown here or there, as they may be needed to hold or to crush the enemy. They are to stand still and be ploughed through by shot and shell, or rush into the thickest of the fight, just as they may be ordered. They are not to question the order;—

“Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.”